There are in use today many kinds of copying machines utilizing electro-mechanical, photographic or other techniques, which copy the whole of an image and reproduce one or more copies of the image as a continuous operation. There are also machines which can copy a portion of an image, for example by using a shutter or other barrier to interrupt light reflected from the portion of the image not desired to be copied, or by the use of small hand-held or specially mounted scanning heads capable of scanning a small, defined area.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,993,865 discloses a hand-held scanning device which is moved across a line of print and generates a two-dimensional scan of the print. Movement of the scanner across the page generates strobe pulses which allow the scanner output to be stored in a memory, from which the data are read out to a television monitor. The memory in effect acts as a buffer, so that data which are obtained from the scanner at a variable rate are read out from the memory at a fixed rate suitable for the television raster.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,541,248 discloses a hand-held scanner connected to a recording unit for copying and reproducing lines of text. The rate of linear movement of the reproducer is dependent upon the rate of movement of the scanner to permit high quality reproduction no matter how fast or how slow the scanner is moved across the page.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,318,996 discloses a portable hand-held scanner/reproducer for copying and reproducing printed or graphic material as the original material is scanned.
Selected parts of images often need to be copied, frequently by precise selection, in order to reproduce part of an image which is imbedded within the whole, for example, a sentence within a paragraph of text. It is also often required to reproduce a number of sentences, copied from the same or different documents, in one compact format.
Accordingly, a purpose of this invention is to permit selective copying by selective control of scanning operations or of data generated by a scanning device capable of scanning the whole of an image, or any precisely defined area of it, without the need for special optics, adjustments, or special placement of the scanning transducer.
In particular, a purpose of this invention is to selectively copy, and make ready for reproduction, parts of documents containing printed matter, marks on paper, diagrams, words, sentences, paragraphs or other parts, without gaps between such parts in order to minimize wasted space and save time in storing, transmitting or reproducing the parts selectively copied.
Another purpose of this invention is to enable copies of complete pages, parts of a page, or parts of a number of different pages, to be reproduced on a single page. The term "page" is used here to describe a convenient quantity of information reproduced on paper, or temporarily displayed on an opto-electric, electric or electronic device such as a cathode ray tube for viewing, or permanently or temporarily stored in electrical form so that it may later be reproduced in any suitable manner. The images stored in bit form may also be "edited", i.e., the scanned images may be modified so that the modified page contains parts of the original page, without gaps in order to reduce required storage space, transmission time, and paper when the image is ultimately printed.
Alternatively, editing may be performed without reference to a display by using an in-line sensor or scanning wand, as hereinafter described, whose size embraces the maximum number of lines of text normally required to be selected from a page. A smaller number of lines may be selected by electronically limiting the active length of the wand according to the setting of a control.
A further purpose of this invention is to receive data representing an image from one or more remote stations, convert the data into a visible image so that it may be viewed for the purpose of selecting the whole or portions of it for copying, convert the images back into data form, and transmit these data to one or more remote stations for further processing.
It will be appreciated that copying or selective copying functions can be performed on image information already in bit form from any source and transmitted to any location without the necessity for image transducing. Accordingly, the invention should not be considered as requiring the transducing of images into data bit form.
A still further purpose of this invention is to receive data representing images from a number of sources, for example, from a number of transducers used for copying, in order to store the data for local reproduction, or for onward transmission with or without further manipulation at a convenient time and at a rate limited only by the bandwidth of the available communication channel, to one or more remote destinations.
It may be desired to store one or more images from one or more sources either in the received form, or in an "edited" form, for onward transmission en bloc at a convenient later time, for example, when the cost of transmission is at its lowest.
Alternatively, data and synchronizing pulses may be forwarded in magnetic tape form, in which case the invention may output data at a suitable rate for storage using a small, generally available digital tape recorder of the type used with micro-computers. Data collected from several different places, or from different sites, could thereby conveniently be sent to a central facility for loading into a tape-reading printer.
A further purpose of this invention is to enable a transducer of suitable size to be chosen and plugged into an image processor, whereby a transducer only as large as the maximum size of the image to be copied can be used. By limiting the size of the transducer to the maximum size of the image to be used, the copying process can be made much more efficient and cost-effective.